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>> I studied electrical engineering and was drawn to Rice
because it -- I wanted engineering.
It was a good engineering school and the price was right which was zero at the time.
[laughter] And I was very fortunate in that in my sophomore year, they took a few of us
and did an experimental course and we had instead of taking some of the courses
for an engineering degree, we took philosophy from Radoslav Tsanoff
who was a famous philosophy teacher at the time.
Logic and special mathematics.
Highly theoretical mathematics and it was just a very different introduction to the humanities
and advanced mathematics that we would have not got another way.
And we had a one semester course in introduction to semiconductors and computers and I decided
that that sounded like a better place to be than rotating machinery and transmission lines
so I studied the markets and determined that IBM was the leader in computers
and Texas Instruments at that time was the leader in semiconductors.
So I interviewed just those two.
It turned out to be a good decision.
IBM wanted to send me to the west coast in research, I really wanted to get
into the business side of it quickly, Texas Instruments wanted me
in applications engineering, and so I decided to go to Texas Instruments.
And that was a very good situation because I had an interesting career there
that moved me around all over the place.
And had I not been in Dallas, I would not have met my wife Stephanie
and so that was a prime benefit of all of that.
When I went with the company, I think we only had about 400 people
in the semiconductor business, if that.
When I actually -- when I was president of the semiconductor business there,
a number of years later, I had over 30,000 people.
So that kind of growth occurred in a short career there.
When we developed the digital-signal processor, I wanted to get an understanding of the science
that underlay the DSP and so I went back to Sid Burrus who was a classmate of mine
and who was now Dean of Engineering at Rice to see if we could have some projects together.
It turned out we not only had projects together, we had over 20 of them and in the process,
Sidney wrote the basic book on Digital Signal Processing
and all with Texas Instruments parts in it.
So we ended up with that as a real driver for the market and as a result,
we ended up dominating the market for a period of time and it was a very,
very profitable piece of business.
It ended up about a quarter or third of Texas Instruments business in a short amount of time.
One of the things you learned at Rice was to be fearless.
In those days, we were working on big rotating machines.
This big. And if you had your hand in the wrong place, you could get a finger torn off
or if you got across the terminals you might get 400-volts and get a good shock.
So at MIT, they were -- had little model engines and --
motors and they worked with these model motors and it seemed that they learned the same things,
but when asked -- when we asked the head
of the engineering department why couldn't we do it like MIT?
He had a very simple answer.
You can't learn to tame lions playing with kittens.
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